Staying Sane: Part 3 - Satisfying Our Needs

We are told to stay angry, stay weird, stay home, stay hungry, stay in our lanes, and so on, but what we need to do is stay sane in this crazy world.

This article covers three general ways to keep sane:

1. Appreciating how we are unique and what we share,

2. The excitement of working with others,

3. Enjoying complexity rather than over-simplification.

The Sanity of Fingerprints

Seeing meaning in our world and in our lives maintains our clarity of mind. In the study of strategy, we call this “knowing our mission.” Since we all have needs, we all have a mission, whether we realize it or not. The universal mission is seeking rewards from others to satisfy our needs.

Each of us have unique needs, but we also share many of these needs with others. Our uniqueness is a special focus of this article, but so it our sharing. Our needs are as different as snowflakes or fingerprints, but what looks more like a fingerprint or a snowflake than another fingerprint or snowflake.

Like our needs, what we offer to others is special and unique, but this uniqueness arises from our position in life. The word for “life” is a synonym for work, making a living. Making a living keeps us sane. Because of the way our brains work, without the satisfaction of achievement, we seek gratification in ever risky forms until we come to a bad end. When we do things that others enjoy, they reward us, both by our pay and their recognition. This makes us happier than doing what we please.

The Stimulation of Human Contact

Without human contact we go insane. We need both the intimate contact in our personal lives and the constant stimulations of the larger world. If we had to work in a factory job all our lives, on an assembly line, repeating the same task over and over, without contact with other people, we would quickly go crazy. Fortunately, those jobs don’t exist. Even factory workers must learn from others continuously because factories today must adapt so quickly.

All work requires strategy because we work with other people. We learn standard procedures, but everyone with whom we deal with is complex. When we serve others, we must tailor our responses to the constant change of people, needs, and situations. This forces us to keep in touch with reality.

We must always struggle with complexity and uncertainty. This is why we must live our lives honestly. Lies blur our reality and make everything more complex because they require constant maintenance. Our resulting confusion about priorities leads to poor decisions and regret. Strategic methods, like breaking positions down into the five elements, simplify a few aspects of life’s’ complexity, but these are tools, not a portrayal of real life.

The Insanity of Over-Simplification

Faced with the daunting complexities of life, many seek shelter in simple ideologies. Ideologies are not tools applied, but simplistic philosophies that encompass everything. Those devoted to ideologies can believe and repeat crazier and crazier things no matter how obviously untrue they become. The ideology is more important than any other fact, not matter how true.

There are three dangers signals of over-simplification:

1. Losing sight of the delicious complexity of the world,

2. Making it too easy to condemn others, and

3. Shifting us from productive comparison to grievance contests.